“It’s All About Me”: Rand Paul Criticized By Fellow Republican For Threatening To Filibuster Gun Bill He Hasn’t Even Seen
Thirteen Republican senators have pledged to filibuster a senate debate about new gun safety measures, insisting in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) that they will “oppose any legislation that would infringe on the American people’s constitutional right to bear arms, or their ability to exercise this right without being subjected to government surveillance.” The threat, which Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) first made last week without seeing the bill, comes just days before the body prepares to consider the first comprehensive gun legislation in the aftermath of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. The package will expand restrictions against gun trafficking, invest in school safety and provide for universal background checks of all gun purchases.
But one top Republican, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), is speaking out publicly against the group, questioning the wisdom of promising to filibuster legislation that lawmakers have yet to finalize:
After Mr. Coburn was asked multiple times an identically worded question about whether he would join Mr. Paul’s effort to block gun legislation as he traveled around Oklahoma in recent days, Mr. Coburn bristled at the idea that Mr. Paul would threaten to filibuster a bill before its contents were made final.
“Is that about filibustering a bill to protect the Second Amendment, or is that about Rand Paul?” Mr. Coburn said at a town-hall meeting at the Oklahoma Sports Museum in Guthrie, Okla., on Wednesday. “I’ve done more filibusters than Rand Paul is old,” Mr. Coburn said, but he added that he doesn’t announce such moves before he understands the bill.
Coburn is working on compromise legislation that would expand background checks to all gun purchases, but would not require private sellers to keep a record of the transaction, which gun safety advocates say would ensure that checks are being properly conducted and allow the entire chain of custody to be reconstructed in the event the gun is later recovered in a crime.
Should the Republicans proceed to filibuster on the motion to proceed to the gun package, Reid could take advantage of a new Senate rule “by promising each party two amendments on the legislation.” “Under that scenario, Paul and his allies would still get a chance to raise their objections on the floor for hours on end, but they couldn’t stop the Senate from starting debate on the bill,” Politico reports.
By: Igor Volsky, Think Progress, April 6, 2013
“The Cultural Fight For Guns”: Understanding Does Not Entail Acceptance
One of the oddities of the gun-control debate—apart from ours being the only country that really has one—is that the gun side basically gave up on serious arguments about safety or self-defense or anything else a while ago. The old claims about the million—or was it two million? It kept changing—bad guys stopped by guns each year has faded under the light of scrutiny. Indeed, people who possess guns are almost five times more likely to be shot than those who don’t. (“A gun may falsely empower its possessor to overreact, instigating and losing otherwise tractable conflicts with similarly armed persons,” the authors of one study point out, to help explain that truth.) Far from providing greater safety, gun possession greatly increases the risk of getting shot—and, as has long been known, keeping a gun in the house chiefly endangers the people who live there.
And so the new arguments for keeping as many guns as possible in the hands of as many people as possible tend to be more broadly fatalistic, and sometimes sniffily “cultural.” Ours is a gun-ridden country and a gun-filled culture, the case goes, and to try and change that is not just futile but, in a certain sense, disrespectful, even ill-mannered. It’s not just that Mayor Bloomberg’s indignation is potentially counter-productive—basically, his critics suggest, if not so bluntly, because a rich, short Jew from New York is not a persuasive advocate against guns. It’s that Mayor Bloomberg just doesn’t get it, doesn’t understand the central role that guns play in large parts of non-metropolitan American culture. What looks to his admirers like courage his detractors dismiss as snobbishness.
And so the real argument about guns, and about assault weapons in particular, is becoming not primarily an argument about public safety or public health but an argument about cultural symbols. It has to do, really, with the illusions that guns provide, particularly the illusion of power. The attempts to use the sort of logic that helped end cigarette smoking don’t quite work, because the “smokers” in this case feel something less tangible and yet more valued than their own health is at stake. As my friend and colleague Alec Wilkinson wrote, with the wisdom of a long-ago cop, “Nobody really believes it’s about maintaining a militia. It’s about having possession of a tool that makes a person feel powerful nearly to the point of exaltation. …I am not saying that people who love guns inordinately are unstable; I am saying that a gun is the most powerful device there is to accessorize the ego.”
It’s true. Everyone, men especially, needs ego-accessories, and they are most often irrationally chosen. Middle-aged stockbrokers in New York collect Stratocasters and Telecasters they’ll never play; Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld own more cars than they can drive. Wine cellars fill up with wine that will never be drunk. The propaganda for guns and the identification of gun violence with masculinity is so overpoweringly strong in our culture that it is indeed hard to ask those who already feel disempowered to resist their allure. If we asked all those middle-aged bankers to put away their Strats—an activity that their next-door neighbors would bless—they would be indignant. It’s not about music; it’s about me, they would say, and my right to own a thing that makes me happy. And so with guns. Dan Baum, for instance, has an interesting new book out, “Gun Guys: A Road Trip.” His subjects, those gun guys, are portrayed sympathetically—they are sympathetic—and one gets their indignation at what they see as their “warrior ethic” being treated with contempt by non-gun guys. (That’s, at least, how they experience it, though where it matters, in Congressional votes, there is little but deference.) As Baum points out, gun laws are loose in America because that’s the way most Americans want it, or them.
But though you’ve got to empathize before you can understand, understanding doesn’t entail acceptance. Slavery, polygamy, female circumcision—all these things played a vital role at one time or another in somebody’s sense of the full expression of who they are. We struggle to understand our own behavior in order to alter it: everything evil that has ever been done on earth was once a precious part of somebody’s culture, including our own.
We should indeed be as tolerant as humanly possible about other people’s pleasures, even when they’re opaque to us, and try only to hive off the bad consequences from the good. The trouble is that assault weapons have no good consequences in civilian life. A machine whose distinguishing characteristic is that it can put a hundred and sixty-five lethal projectiles into the air in a few moments has no real use except to kill many living things very quickly. We cannot limit its bad uses while allowing its beneficial ones, because it has no beneficial ones. If the only beneficial ones are the feeling of power they provide, then that’s not good enough—not for the rest of us to be obliged to tolerate their capacity to damage and kill. (And as to the theoretical tyrannies that they protect us from: well, if our democratic government and its military did turn on us, that would surely present a threat and a problem that no number of North Dakotans with their Bushmasters could solve.)
In a practical sense, we’ve been reduced to arguing about marginal measures—a universal background check, which might still become law; an assault-weapons ban, which seems to have been put aside. There is, let it be said, another cultural argument to be made here about both. Though gun violence remains shockingly common in America, gun massacres, of the kind that took place in Newtown or, before, in Aurora (remember that? A while ago now, though this week the shooter appeared in court) and that are dependent, in some ways, on the speed and scope of assault weapons, are still statistically rare. If one is playing the odds, there really isn’t any reason to be frightened for your children each time you drop them off at first grade, though parents feel that fear anyway. They might have more to worry about from the gun in the closet, or the person who will still be able to get a gun legally. That’s true about lots of things. It’s even truer about terrorism, for instance. Yet, rather obviously, we spend a lot of money, and go through many airport contortions, to protect ourselves from what is, rationally considered, a minute threat.
That we do so is not unreasonable. Though, from a cold-blooded accounting point of view, we might be able to survive many more 9/11s, the shiver that one feels writing that sentence reveals its falseness. The nation might survive it, but we would not, in the sense that our belief in ourselves, our feeling for our country, our core sense of optimism about the future, would collapse with repeated terrorist attacks. And so it is with gun massacres, whether in Aurora or Newtown or the next place. Our sense of what is an acceptable and unacceptable risk for any citizen, let alone child, to endure, our sense of possible futures to consider—above all, our sense, to borrow a phrase from the President, of who we are, what we stand for, the picture of our civilization we want to look at ourselves and present to the world—all of that is very much at stake even if the odds of any given child being killed are, blessedly, small. Laws should be designed to stop likely evils; it’s true, not every possible evil. But some possible evils are evil enough to call for laws just by their demonstrated possibility. There are a few things a society just can’t bear, and watching its own kids killed in the classroom, even every once in a while, is one of them.
By: Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, April 4, 2013
“Like Sands Through The Hourglass”: The Original GOP Gun Flip-Flop
If you’ve been following the gun control debate, you probably know that universal background checks are on life support after Republicans lawmakers flip-flopped on their support for closing the private seller loophole. You may also know that the National Rifle Association itself once supported universal background checks, even though it’s leading the charge against them now.
But would Republicans really kill a bid to expand background checks, even though they supported them so recently and despite polls showing nine in 10 American favor an expansion?
We don’t have to wonder because they already did, back in 1999 after the Columbine shooting. Thirty-one Senate Republicans — including current Minority Leader Mitch McConnell — joined with Democrats to close the gun show loophole, only to have their colleagues in the House kill it. The saga has largely escaped notice so far this year, but offers some important lessons for those who favor gun control today.
By 1999, pro-gun control forces hadn’t seen progress since Republicans captured control of both houses of Congress five years earlier. But after the Columbine school shooting in late April, public opinion shifted dramatically and President Clinton pushed to close the so-called gun show loophole and pass a host of other gun control measures.
A Washington Post/ABC News poll found that 89 percent of Americans favored background checks for people buying guns at gun shows — almost identical to polls today.
In fact, when Senate Republicans narrowly defeated a Democratic measure to close the gun show loophole on May 12 of that year, the public outcry was so intense that the GOPers reversed course within less than 24 hours. “As outraged constituents lit up phone lines on Capitol Hill to protest the earlier vote and the Clinton administration launched a barrage of criticism, Senate leaders huddled with National Rifle Association lobbyists and GOP strategists to undo what several Republicans feared could arouse voter reprisals in next year’s elections,” the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time.
Sen. John McCain joined with Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch and Sen. Larry Craig, an NRA board member, to come up with their own proposal. The GOP bill required anyone attending a gun show with the intent of selling a firearm to get a background check on purchasers, but gave law enforcement only 24 hours to review the check, instead of the typical three days, and didn’t cover flea markets or pawn shops. It passed by a single vote, largely along party lines.
“There was a realization that there was a loophole that had to be closed,” McCain said. (A year later, McCain would go on to cut an ad endorsing two state measures to enact universal background checks, as Greg Sargent reported yesterday.)
But Democrats weren’t satisfied and demanded more. Clinton said the GOP bill was “riddled with high-caliber loopholes” and Republicans caved — they dismissed their own bill and took up the Democratic proposal once again. “They’re getting the shit kicked out of them in the media and they know it; they’re in complete disarray. Basically, the country is seeing just how beholden the Republican caucus is to the NRA,” an unnamed Democratic staffer told Jake Tapper, then at Salon.
Just two weeks later, victory came when Vice President Al Gore cast the deciding vote to approve the Democratic amendment, which was attached to a larger juvenile justice bill introduced by New Jersey Democrat Frank Lautenberg, one of Congress’ most outspoken proponents of gun control.
Six moderate GOPers voted for the amendment to close the loophole. But a whopping 31 Senate Republicans voted for final passage of the larger bill, including the Democratic provision to mandate background checks at gun shows, giving it a huge 73-25 majority. McConnell voted in favor, as did Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions, two of the most powerful Republicans in the upper chamber today, along with conservative stalwarts like Rick Santorum, Strom Thurmond and Jon Kyl.
“This is a turning point for our country,” Gore proclaimed. But the victory was short-lived.
In June, the Republican-controlled House passed a bill with a much weaker background check provision, and rejected the Senate version. Then nothing happened. Usually, the Senate and House would each appoint representatives to hash out the differences between their two bills. But instead, House Republicans simply refused to appoint negotiators for months, sapping momentum from the bill.
By the time the first anniversary of the Columbine shooting rolled around in April of 2000, there had still been no forward motion.
Activists kept up the pressure for months, as did Clinton, but the public had grown weary and lawmakers no longer faced the constituent pressure of the previous year. ”Despite a series of tragic shootings in our nation’s schools, places of worship, day care centers, and workplaces Congress has stalled passage of common-sense gun safety legislation that passed in the Senate for over one year,” Clinton said in November of 2000, 18 months after the Senate passed a bill with a large bipartisan majority to close the loophole. But by then, the election had sealed the fate of the Democratic bill and universal background checks, at least until 2013.
The saga provides two big lessons. First, it shows that advocates must move quickly in order to capitalize on the public outcry following a mass a shooting like the one at Columbine. Already, three and half months after Sandy Hook, momentum seems to be flagging as Republicans walk away from one commitment after another. It may be too late, but if it’s not, Democrats need to move quickly while they can.
And second, it shows that those opposed to reform are not above using every procedural hurdle at their disposal to thwart reform, even when the vast majority of Americans support change and when their own party has voted for it just months earlier. In 1999, the public opinion landscape was even more favorable than it is today, but a minority of Republicans in leadership were able to kill it. More important, they weren’t punished for it in the next election. If you were a Republican lawmaker today, the experience of 14 years ago might convince you to obstruct, hunker down and hope the issue just goes away.
UPDATE: In 2001, the NRA’s official magazine wrote a lengthy article attacking John McCain, calling him “one of the premier flag carriers for the enemies of the Second Amendment.”
By: Alex Seitz-Wald, Salon, April 4, 2013
“Dealing With A Supine Congress”: Will The GOP Be Allowed To Block Background Checks?
Is Congress on the verge of turning away from the lessons of the slaughter in Newtown even as Connecticut enacts sweeping laws to curb gun violence? Is the gun lobby hellbent on aligning our country with such great friends of liberty as Iran, North Korea and Syria by opposing efforts to condition international gun sales on the human rights records of buyers?
The gun lobby seems to want the rest of the world to look upon the United States of America as a nation so crazed about guns that its supine Congress will always collapse before the National Rifle Association.
The bleak future envisioned by the gun extremists was laid out for all to see by the small town of Nelson, Ga., whose council voted Monday to require all its citizens to own guns. The town says it won’t enforce the measure, but Nelson sends us a dark message: Guns matter more than freedom. The right not to bear arms can be infringed freely.
The vote in the United Nations on Tuesday for a global convention to keep conventional arms out of the hands of human rights violators, terrorists and organized-crime figures was overwhelming, 154 to 3, with 23 abstentions. North Korea, Iran and Syria provided the no votes, while China and Russia were among the abstainers.
It will be years at best before the treaty is implemented, and the NRA (of course) wants to block its ratification by the Senate — in effect, preventing background checks for human rights violators. But we can be proud that the United States ignored the weapons fundamentalists and voted yes.
Meanwhile, on a bipartisan basis, the Connecticut General Assembly was moving to pass a broad background-check bill that would also regulate the private sales of shotguns and rifles, ban high-capacity magazines and expand the list of prohibited assault weapons.
Connecticut Republicans should lobby members of their party in the U.S. Senate. These days, the GOP is all about trying to improve its image. But on guns, it may prove once again that when it matters, extremists rule.
Only one Republican senator, Mark Kirk of Illinois, has had the courage to work with Democrats for a meaningful background-check law. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has shown some boldness in negotiating on a bill with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y). But Coburn has yet to close a deal that wouldn’t severely weaken background-check requirements. Otherwise, GOP senators have declined to engage seriously.
There has been much speculation about whether President Obama should have moved even faster after Newtown. And yes, it would have been better if gun-control advocates had united two months ago behind a focused agenda that the president could have pushed immediately.
But contrary to the late-inning analysis you’re hearing, the game isn’t over.
A lot has been said about the four to six Senate Democratic holdouts on background checks, but Democrats are likely to provide roughly 50 votes for a strong bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), a traditional NRA supporter, deserves particular kudos for his persistence on behalf of a decent outcome. The real barrier in the Senate comes from Republicans. The question for many of them is whether they honestly think that letting weapons manufacturers dictate the party’s positions on gun violence is a recipe for renewal.
Based on what they have said, a host of GOP senators just might find the daring to tell their party that gutting a background-check bill is foolish, substantively and politically. Their ranks include John McCain, who has been brave on this issue in the past, as well as Pat Toomey, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Jeff Flake, Mike Johanns, Dean Heller, Johnny Isakson, Saxby Chambliss, Lamar Alexander, Bob Corker and Rob Portman. They hold the key.
Farther down the road, gun-control advocates need even more discipline, and they cannot stop organizing after this fight is over. It will take years to build the kind of muscle the gun lobby has. Doing so will create the political space for other measures, including an assault weapons ban.
The good news is that the mobilization for gun sanity is farther along now than it has ever been. Members of this anti-violence coalition have proved their strength in Connecticut, Colorado and New York, and they should keep pursuing progress at the state level. Change will eventually bubble up to the halls of Congress.
We are in a long battle. Victory in this round is well within reach. Future victories will require staying power, not recriminations.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 3, 2013
“Gun Lobby Goons At It Again”: The NRA’s Disarming Plan To Arm Schools
The gun-lobby goons were at it again.
The National Rifle Association’s security guards gained notoriety earlier this year when, escorting NRA officials to a hearing, they were upbraided by Capitol authorities for pushing cameramen. The thugs were back Tuesday when the NRA rolled out its “National School Shield” — the gun lobbyists’ plan to get armed guards in public schools — and this time they were packing heat.
About 20 of them — roughly one for every three reporters — fanned out through the National Press Club, some in uniforms with gun holsters exposed, others with earpieces and bulges under their suit jackets.
In a spectacle that officials at the National Press Club said they had never seen before, the NRA gunmen directed some photographers not to take pictures, ordered reporters out of the lobby when NRA officials passed and inspected reporters’ briefcases before granting them access to the news conference.
The antics gave new meaning to the notion of disarming your critics.
By journalistic custom and D.C. law, of course, reporters don’t carry guns to news conferences — and certainly not when the person at the lectern is the NRA’s Asa Hutchinson, an unremarkable former congressman and Bush administration official whom most reporters couldn’t pick out of a lineup. But the NRA wasn’t going to leave any doubt about its superior firepower.
Thus has it gone so far in the gun debate in Washington. The legislation is about to be taken up in Congress, but by most accounts the NRA has already won. Plans for limiting assault weapons and ammunition clips are history, and the prospects for meaningful background checks are bleak. Now, The Post’s Philip Rucker and Ed O’Keefe report, the NRA is proposing language to gut the last meaningful gun-control proposal, making gun trafficking a federal crime. Apparently, the gun lobby thinks even criminals deserve Second Amendment protection.
If the NRA has its way, as it usually does, states will soon be weakening their gun laws to allow more guns in schools. The top two recommendations Hutchinson announced Tuesday involved firearms in the schoolhouse. The first: “training programs” for “designated armed school personnel.” The second: “adoption of model legislation by individual states to allow for armed school personnel.”
Hutchinson claimed that his task force, which came up with these ideas, had “full independence” from the NRA. By coincidence, the proposals closely matched those announced by the NRA before it formed and funded the task force. The task force did scale back plans to protect schools with armed volunteer vigilantes, opting instead for arming paid guards and school staff — at least one in every school. States and school districts “are prepared” to pay for it, Hutchinson declared.
The task force garnished the more-guns recommendations with some good ideas, such as better fencing, doors and security monitoring for schools, and more mental-health intervention. But much of that is in the overall Senate legislation that the NRA is trying to kill.
To close his case, Hutchinson introduced a secret weapon, “special guest” Mark Mattioli, the father of one of the Newtown, Conn., victims. Mattioli told reporters that there had been “nine school shootings since Newtown” but that Newtown was “off the bell curve, if you will, with respect to the impact.”
Perhaps that’s because the Newtown killer had a military-style gun with a 30-round magazine?
Hutchinson, queried by a reporter from Connecticut, said that limiting assault weapons is “totally inadequate” because it “doesn’t stop violence in the schools.” Likewise, he told CBS News’s Nancy Cordes, limiting magazine clips won’t work as well as his plan to “give the schools more tools” — i.e., guns. And he told CNN’s Jim Acosta that background checks weren’t related to his focus of school safety.
Fox News’s Chad Pergram mentioned the gun-control legislation. “Do you see any common ground?” he asked.
“This will be the common ground,” Hutchinson said of his proposals.
If so, American schoolchildren may grow accustomed to the sort of scene Hutchinson caused Tuesday, protected by more armed guards than a Third World dictator.
Hutchinson, pressed by reporters about the armed goons, said: “You go into a mall, there is security. And so there is security here at the National Press Club.”
A reporter asked Hutchinson what he was afraid of.
“There’s nothing I’m afraid of. I’m very wide open,” Hutchinson replied, separated from his unarmed questioners by an eight-foot buffer zone, a lectern, a raised podium, a red-velvet rope and a score of gun-toting men. “There’s nothing I’m nervous about.”
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 2, 2013
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